Well, the hayfever has got me again! Here I am at 6am with a bunged up nose and itchy eyes wide awake. So I thought I would do the sensible thing and give you a heads up on what’s due in the next release of SAF.

Here’s the Feature list :

New Actions

STSAdm Action. This allows us to call STSAdm commands and pass arguments from a SAF Macro.

Powershell Action. Allows us to to call Powershell “Function” and pass arguments from a SAF Macro.

Adapters

In SAF, we think of “Adapters” as being components that allow a SAF Macro to be run from a particular technology. In the current release we have :

STSAdm Adapter. Allows you to run SAF from an STSAdm extension.

Feature Adapter. Allows you to SAF run from a SharePoint Feature. This is simple as creating a Feature.Xml and a Macro.xml file. Check out the Quick Start for more info.

In the next release here’s what’s coming :

MSBuild Adapter. This will let you hook SAF directly into your MSBuild process. This is going to pretty useful for companies that already have a MSBuild process, but want to hook SharePoint automation in too.

WCF Adapter. This could be one of the most powerful adapters out there. It’s effectively going to allow you to run SAF remotely. eg. if you are working locally on a SharePoint DEV farm and want to push some SharePoint changes to a different farm then (say QA), then this will let you do that. If you mix this concept with the use of Gary LaPoint’s awesome STSAdm extensions, then wow – we have just given you a way to run tons of STSAdm commands (or Powershell scripts) remotely!

Visual Studio DSL

Not sure this will make the next release, but, we are intending to write a GUI in Visual Studio that will allow you to create a Macro using Graphical canvas to do so.

Changes to the SAF Context

If you don’t know – the SAF Context is pretty much a Prop Bag that gets passed between one Action to the next. We have made some changes to make this Serializable. There are good reasons for this which I will cover in a later post.

When’s the next release?

Hugo has booked a few weeks into the diary to work on SAF (and Macro Centre using SL3), so we should see a release late next week once he’s finished it. (But we are close!)